The Dutch company The Ocean Cleanup has invested not a million dollars in its new development, and after several years of testing, in the first week of September, the first garbage collection system appeared at sea. System 001 cruised the San Francisco Bay, preparing for its voyage to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
“I am a very happy person. What is happening now is years of preparation for the entire team and now we are seeing the result, ”says one of The Ocean Cleanup specialists van Dalen in a live broadcast.
The system created by Ocean Cleanup is a complex series of tubing (tubing) that is bent into a large “U” shape. A three-meter “skirt” hangs under this pipeline and captures plastic debris that floats with the current, thus trapping the debris. The goal of the project is to haul this giant pipeline into the Pacific Ocean using a ship and then park it on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive garbage heap that has been contaminating waters for decades.
New cleaning system will rid the ocean of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Global Ecology
Crew members on board the vessel will be able to collect garbage from the “skirt” and be sent back to the mainland for recycling. According to USA Today, a garbage collection ship will pick up the “catch” for processing every 6-8 weeks.
The Ocean Cleanup team hopes to cut the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in half in five years, but it will take much more than one System 001. set time.
The launch of System 001 is a critical first step in this strategy. After 2-3 weeks of testing is completed, she will travel to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where she can finally begin to destroy this huge “monument” of ocean pollution. By the way, this is an old dream of the 24-year-old founder of the project, Boyan Slat, who started working on this concept as a teenager, and of course, this is the big dream of ecologists all over the world who are fighting for the cleanliness of the oceans and the health of their inhabitants.